Halloween is a good occasion to think about why the destruction of cemeteries is the nuclear option of cultural war. Attacks on places of the dead are aimed not just at the present of a people—a strike against the living whose ancestors are gathered there—but at their past. It is meant to wipe out the history that defines a community.

If Halloween is—or at least was, back when it was called All Souls Day and the names of generations of the dead in a churchyard were read aloud in every parish—an occasion for bringing the dead temporarily back to life, desecrating cemeteries is the opposite: an act of erasure.

The Guardian recently published satellite photographs that document the Chinese government’s large-scale use of this weapon of mass cultural genocide. In Aksu, Anjang Province, what in 2015 had been a large cemetery where the most important Uighur poet of the twentieth century, Lutpulla Mutellip, was buried, was in 2019 bulldozed to the ground and replaced by Happiness Park. Sulinim and Teywizim cemeteries in Hotan, were still intact in 2018; both are now empty spaces now except for a parking garage in one of them. At least forty-five cemeteries have been leveled according to an Agence France Press/Earthrise Alliance analysis as part of the Chinese assault on Uighar culture.